Course description
The United States currently keeps more of its own citizens behind bars than any other country in the history of the world. While the US's emergence as the global leader in incarceration rates is a relatively recent development, the prison has loomed large in American public life for 200 years. This course approaches the prison not as a marginal phenomenon, but as an institution central to American culture. We examine works of literature by and about prisoners alongside an expansive historical archive that includes reformers' pamphlets, sociological studies, government reports, and inmate manifestos. Over the years, American prisons have been variously described as models of innovation and reform, as hotbeds of unrest and rebellion, as vestiges of slavery, and as vital components in the wars on drugs, crime, and terror. These evolving debates about imprisonment have also continually raised questions about what it means to be free in America. This interdisciplinary course traces those debates from the early days of the penitentiary through our present era of mass incarceration.
